Last word on building 7

From the Battalion Chief Kenahan of the FDNY Safety Battalion debriefing of firefighter Banaciski:

“They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone. We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings.

“I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they pulled us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in there.

“Finally it did come down. From there – this is much later on in the day, because every day we were so worried about that building we didn’t really want to get people close. They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in there. Finally it did come down. That’s when they let the guys go in. I just remember we started searching around all the rigs.

“That was basically the rest of the day, the rest of the night. We were searching around rigs looking for men. That was it.”

——–

I suppose they’re in on it too. There’s no other explanation!

Update: Many more firefighter quotes that put the lie to the bld.7 theories are below in the comments…

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15 thoughts on “Last word on building 7”

“The most important operational decision to be made that afternoon was the collapse (Of the WTC towers) had damaged 7 World Trade Center, which is about a 50 story building, at Vesey between West Broadway and Washington Street. It had very heavy fire on many floors and I ordered the evacuation of an area sufficient around to protect our members, so we had to give up some rescue operations that were going on at the time and back the people away far enough so that if 7 World Trade did collapse, we [wouldn't] lose any more people. We continued to operate on what we could from that distance and approximately an hour and a half after that order was [given], at 5:30 in the afternoon, World Trade Center collapsed completely” – Daniel Nigro, Chief of Department Source

“Early on, there was concern that 7 World Trade Center might have been both impacted by the collapsing tower and had several fires in it and there was a concern that it might collapse. So we instructed that a collapse area — (Q. A collapse zone?) — Yeah — be set up and maintained so that when the expected collapse of 7 happened, we wouldn’t have people working in it. There was considerable discussion with Con Ed regarding the substation in that building and the feeders and the oil coolants and so on. And their concern was of the type of fire we might have when it collapsed.” – Chief Cruthers Source

“Then we found out, I guess around 3:00 [o'clock], that they thought 7 was going to collapse. So, of course, [we've] got guys all in this pile over here and the main concern was get everybody out, and I guess it took us over an hour and a half, two hours to get everybody out of there. (Q. Initially when you were there, you had said you heard a few Maydays?) Oh, yes. We had Maydays like crazy…. The heat must have been tremendous. There was so much [expletive] fire there. This whole pile was burning like crazy. Just the heat and the smoke from all the other buildings on fire, you [couldn't] see anything. So it took us a while and we ended up backing everybody out, and [that's] when 7 collapsed…. Basically, we fell back for 7 to collapse, and then we waited a while and it got a lot more organized, I would guess.” – Lieutenant William Ryan Source

Firehouse: When you looked at the south side, how close were you to the base of that side?
Boyle: I was standing right next to the building, probably right next to it.
Firehouse: When you had fire on the 20 floors, was it in one window or many?
Boyle: There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we’ll head back to the command post. We lost touch with him. I never saw him again that day. Source

Hayden: Yeah. There was enough there and we were marking off. There were a lot of damaged apparatus there that were covered. We tried to get searches in those areas. By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing, but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

Firehouse: Was there heavy fire in there right away? Hayden: No, not right away, and that’s probably why it stood for so long because it took a while for that fire to develop. It was a heavy body of fire in there and then we didn’t make any attempt to fight it. That was just one of those wars we were just going to lose. We were concerned about the collapse of a 47-story building there. We were worried about additional collapse there of what was remaining standing of the towers and the Marriott, so we started pulling the people back after a couple of hours of surface removal and searches along the surface of the debris. We started to pull guys back because we were concerned for their safety.

Firehouse: Chief Nigro said they made a collapse zone and wanted everybody away from number 7- did you have to get all of those people out? Hayden: Yeah, we had to pull everybody back. It was very difficult. We had to be very forceful in getting the guys out. They didn’t want to come out. There were guys going into areas that I wasn’t even really comfortable with, because of the possibility of secondary collapses. We didn’t know how stable any of this area was. We pulled everybody back probably by 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon. We said, this building is going to come down, get back. It came down about 5 o’clock or so, but we had everybody backed away by then. At that point in time, it seemed like a somewhat smaller event, but under any normal circumstances, that’s a major event, a 47-story building collapsing. It seemed like a firecracker after the other ones came down, but I mean that’s a big building, and when it came down, it was quite an event. But having gone through the other two, it didn’t seem so bad. But that’s what we were concerned about. We had said to the guys, we lost as many as 300 guys. We didn’t want to lose any more people that day. And when those numbers start to set in among everybody- My feeling early on was we weren’t going to find any survivors. You either made it out or you didn’t make it out. It was a cataclysmic event. The idea of somebody living in that thing to me would have been only short of a miracle. This thing became geographically sectored because of the collapse. I was at West and Liberty. I couldn’t go further north on West Street. And I couldn’t go further east on Liberty because of the collapse of the south tower, so physically we were boxed in.
Source

WTC Building 7 appears to have suffered significant damage at some point after the WTC Towers had collapsed, according to firefighters at the scene. Firefighter Butch Brandies tells other firefighters that nobody is to go into Building 7 because of creaking and noises coming out of there. [Firehouse Magazine, 8/02]

Battalion Chief John Norman later recalls, “At the edge of the south face you could see that it is very heavily damaged.” [Firehouse Magazine, 5/02]

I think there are so many fuck-tard idiots out there who want to believe whatever it is they want to believe, that’s it would be wholey unnecessary for the state to egg them on. You should see the shit in my email box. They cherry-pick worse than the neocons and then get their feelings all hurt when you call them out. It’s really pathetic.

The only exception is the footage from the pentagon. My belief – not my assertion, not ” I just KNOW it,” not “It’s the only answer I can think of, so it must be!” just my belief, is that the military released the Pentagon footage in order to give the least credible theory these idiots have a good kick in the pants to keep it going.

Greg Palast is friends with the guy, Theirry Myssian, who made up the missile hit the pentagon crap. Ready for this? Greg: “Why are you pushing this crap?” Myssian: “[Laughter] It’s my way of separating gullible Americans from money in their pockets they might otherwise spend in ways harmful to themselves, Ha, Ha, Ha!!!” As, according to Greg, he took another drink of red wine.

You know what that means? It means that everyone who thinks a missile hit the pentagon is a fucking idiot. That’s what it means.

Scott your Greg Palast “Theirry Myssian’s missile” story reminds me of the invention of ‘pyramid power’, the allegedly miraculous healing power of the pyramid shape. Martin Gardner, the then mathematical games columnist for ‘Scientific American’, invented the whole thing as a spoof in a column back in the 1960s. He was never able to put this genie back in the bottle once it escaped into the wild frontier of the New Age movement. I suppose it shows that authors have less power (and probably less responsibility??) over the ideas they unleash than we’d like. Its worth checking out Paul Cantor’s book “Gilligan Unbound” , a survey of TV shows, he argues that the success of “The X Files” in the 1990s represented a “mainstreaming of paranoia”. Cantor sees this as a consequence of globalization and the decline of the nation state, but you could also argue that the litany of government lies needed to sell a naturally reluctant electorate on wars hither and yon has created a credibility gap so wide that bizarro conspiracy theories flourish. After 9-11 there was a reported “renewed faith in government” in the US, but whatever recovery there may have been from the X-Files decade of the 1990s has surely been lost in the sands of Iraq.

Wow, I never knew that story about the pyramid power. That’s hilarious. Re: The renewed faith in the state after 9/11, that was one of the worst parts about it. I’m glad it’s over. It’s too bad though, that so many have latched onto this “Truth movement” crap. They are headed straight for a major embarrassment. [By the way, anything that calls itself the “Truth movement” has to be full of it. You know right off the bat that it doesn’t include anyone smart enough to know how stupid that sounds.

Re: Above: I shouldn’t have said “fucking idiot.” That’s not nice. How about “fool”? Or “foolish enough to be fooled by a drunken Frenchman”?

And speaking about X-Files have you guys seen the first episode of the spin off show “The Lone Gunmen”. That was released 4th March 2001 (you can see it on YouTube here ), it featured a plot to remotely control an airliner and crash it into the WTC. The Lone Gunmen actor Dean Haglund seems convinced that there was more to it than coincidence, see his interview here.

I saw the pilot that day. too bad that interview is so edited. seemed like he was saying something about how ‘they’ sorta picked up on the show, tom clancy’s book… he coulda added jackie chan, spiderman, the coup, … also about how the writers were all freaked out about 9/11. did i miss the part where he claims that the cia gave the idea to chris carter? i could swear i’ve heard jones say he says it, but i didn’t here it… if the cia gave the plot to a tv show, would that indicate that they were trying to help the plot along or thwart it?

Of course maybe Osama Bin Laden (or one of his gophers) and (X-Files / Lone Gunmen producer) Chris Carter both read Tom Clancy. I’m not sure if there was an arabic translation of Clancy’s “Sum Of Their Fears”, I’m not sure if that is the title, but there is one Jack Ryan novel where right wing Japanese fanatics crash a 747 into the Capitol building during a joint sitting of Congress. But then again this guy thinks Bin Laden is more of an Isaac Asimov fan.

Either that or they had watched footage of pacific battles during World War II. Or, just like all the evidence indicates, KSM was just following up on the Yousef/Murad plot to crash airliners they’d come up with in 1995. It doesn’t take that much imagination to want to crash something into something.

I think there is a lack of imagination sometimes at work from those who say the WTC collapses must have been controlled demolitions. We have seen plenty of controlled demolitions on TV but not many air crashes into skyscrapers. So people naturally assume the later is an example of the former. I suppose they imagine that a skyscraper collapse “should” look something like knocking over a lego building.